The Papaya Window

The last time I saw Jordan, he was sitting on a fire escape in Queens, eating a papaya with a spoon. This was three years after the accident, after the baseball bat connected with his temple, after the doctors said he might not recognize his own reflection.

"You're staring at my hair again," he said, not looking up from the fruit. "The patch grew back. It's fine."

I'd met Jordan in college. We were those friends—the kind who finish each other's sentences, who share an unspoken language. Then came the recreational league game, the errant pitch, the scramble for a foul ball. Jordan's head met the bat with a sound that still wakes me some nights.

He was different now. Quieter. He'd bought a goldfish—just one—named it Existential Dread, called it Ex for short. The fish lived in a bowl on his windowsill, swimming in endless circles.

"It's the circles," Jordan told me once. "Ex doesn't know he's going nowhere. He just swims. That's a kind of freedom, don't you think?"

I stopped visiting after a while. Not because I didn't care, but because I cared too much. The way he'd trail off mid-conversation. The way he'd forget which fork to use. The way he looked at me sometimes like I was a photograph of someone he used to know.

That day on the fire escape, he finished the papaya and licked the spoon.

"I saw her yesterday," he said.

I froze. We never talked about her—his fiancée who left eight months after the accident, who couldn't handle the version of him that returned.

"At the grocery store," Jordan continued. "She was buying papayas. I wanted to say something. But then I thought: which version of me would be speaking? The one she fell in love with? The one she couldn't leave fast enough? The one sitting here now?"

He set the spoon down on the railing.

"They're all me. That's the joke. And none of them are."

I didn't know what to say. I never did.

"It's okay," Jordan said, finally looking at me. "You don't have to fix it. Some things don't get fixed. They just—become."

A year later, I got a call. The goldfish had died. Jordan had too—quietly, in his sleep, an aneurysm unrelated to the injury, unrelated to anything except the randomness of a body that decides it's done.

At his apartment, clearing out his things, I found the goldfish bowl on the windowsill. Empty. On the kitchen counter, a single papaya, ripe and beginning to soften.

And a note: "Tell Ex I figured it out. The circles aren't the point. The swimming is."

I stood there for a long time, letting the silence become what it was. Then I cut the papaya, took a spoon, and sat by the window, watching the light move across the floor, swimming toward nothing at all.